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Appropriately enough, Jordan Harrison’s déjà-vu-inducing “Marjorie Prime” has been here before. The Off Broadway theatre Playwrights Horizons produced the poignant sci-fi play about hyperrealistic re-creations of the dead—so-called Primes, which are used as a supportive technology for the bereaved—in Anne Kauffman’s spirited, delicately comic production, back in 2015. Lois Smith, then eighty-five years old, played Marjorie, a woman struggling with dementia. It’s the early twenty-sixties, and so Marjorie is attended by a holographic Prime of her husband, Walter, who tells her stories from her own life. Whatever sort of husband he was before his death, this Walter, eternally youthful, has nothing to do but sit ramrod straight, paying perfect attention to his wife, forever.

Now Second Stage revives “Marjorie Prime” at the Hayes, on Broadway, with the mischievous ninety-six-year-old June Squibb as a new and more buoyant Marjorie. Squibb, our ingénue, has also been here before. Her Broadway début was as a replacement in the role of the stripper Electra in the original 1959 production of “Gypsy”—she sang the immortal lyric “If you wanna make it / Twinkle while you shake it.” Squibb has dutifully kept twinkling (and shaking): her late-career renaissance surged in 2014, with an Oscar nomination for her turn as an exasperated wife in “Nebraska”; and, just last year, she starred in the action comedy “Thelma”—and did her own stunts.

Here, Cynthia Nixon plays Marjorie’s anxious daughter, Tess, and Danny Burstein plays her sweet son-in-law, Jon. (Kauffman returns to direct.) The three of them live in a strangely impersonal house—the uncanny set design is by Lee Jellinek—overtly “futuristic” only in its kitchen cabinets, which open upward, like the gull wings on a DeLorean. As Walter, Christopher Lowell is a particularly smooth-faced simulacrum; he is polite and attentive to everything the others say, gathering anecdotes one day so that he can regurgitate them the next. Tess wants to keep certain parts of the past secret from him—that way, Marjorie won’t relearn them—but Jon counsels candor. (Meanwhile, Marjorie persuades Walter to insert a movie-theatre outing to “Casablanca” into a story, to class the memory up a little.)

At first, stage time in “Marjorie Prime” operates according to a Marjorie-based tempo. If she forgets something—a day spent alone in the dark, a fall—then the play doesn’t show it. Blackouts between scenes seem to represent the gaps in Marjorie’s mind, and a great deal happens offstage which Marjorie discovers only when her daughter reminds her. Eventually, though, after her death, Marjorie “returns” as a Prime to support an inconsolable Tess, and the sequence gets even looser. Time jumps might span a year, or more. People die; Primes do not.

Another of Harrison’s sci-fi plays, “The Antiquities,” opened this year at Playwrights—and it, too, focusses on the nonhumans that will follow us. In that play, inorganic intelligences construct dioramas around artifacts from Homo sapiens, wondering how we might have used a clarinet or a bottle of shampoo. Isn’t it a comfort that our creations will still think about us, ex post facto? (The “facto” here is apocalypse.) We’ve been playing this particular wistful-machines chord for a long time: Steven Spielberg’s movie “A.I. Artificial Intelligence,” from 2001, starred Haley Joel Osment as an android copy of a grieving woman’s child who loves her in a way that no real boy could; right now, down the street, the decommissioned robots in the musical “Maybe Happy Ending” also recall their owners with pride and sorrow.

But something spikier is happening in this iteration of “Marjorie Prime.” The intervening decade has changed Harrison’s elegantly resigned “at least they’ll miss us” narrative into something more macabre, more pointed, and more frightening. Walter Prime’s willingness to overwrite facts to suit Marjorie’s preferences looks a lot less adorable in a world where generative-A.I. agents can be tweaked to flatter their owners, not to mention the ramifications of Walter’s constant hunger for Marjorie’s data. We recognize this familiar type of predatory, pacifying interactive technology. Maybe we’ll learn someday soon—maybe even tomorrow!—that the substitution of sycophantic A.I. “conversation” for human exchange was the decisive blow that did us in as a species.

That’s the sort of thinking that can really take the pep out of an evening. And so although Kauffman again directs a production full of warmth—Squibb shines, Burstein radiates kindness—it’s nonetheless a chilling night at the theatre. During the play’s anguished climax, we find out that a character dies by suicide after having spoken, we don’t know for how long, to a Prime. There is no implication in the original text that the thing might have encouraged self-harm, but I have my suspicions. Ten years ago, even Harrison couldn’t have known how relentlessly helpful ChatGPT can be.

Where Harrison uses silences, stillness, and abbreviated scenes to suggest loss, Eugene O’Neill went with the opposite approach: the father of American drama never chose one word when a hundred would do. If during “Anna Christie,” his Pulitzer Prize-winning play from 1921, O’Neill wanted you to note the symbolic effect of, say, fog, he would simply put “fog” in the script twenty-six times.

In the strange, self-sabotaging revival at St. Ann’s Warehouse, directed by Thomas Kail, Michelle Williams plays Anna Christie. Should Anna’s last name suggests a certain savior, it’s because she begins as one of the fallen: an exhausted twenty-year-old prostitute from St. Paul. Greta Garbo played this tough-spirited woman of the world in her first speaking film role, in 1930, and continues to throw a nearly century-long shadow. In Williams’s case, Anna’s famous first line—“Gimme a whiskey, ginger ale on the side, and don’t be stingy, baby!”—comes out with a quiver of self-doubt. It doesn’t sound like bravado. It sounds like a cry for help.

Anna has come East to meet her estranged father, the Swedish bargeman Chris (Brian d’Arcy James), who believes Anna’s been earning money as a nursemaid. Eager to make a respectable impression, Chris shuffles off his hard-bitten companion, Marthy (Mare Winningham, squinting and grumbling delightfully), and father and daughter ride Chris’s barge up the coast, through the fog, ready for a new start. “It makes me feel clean,” Anna says of the sea, as if she’s been washed of her sins. After they rescue a shipwrecked stoker named Mat Burke (Tom Sturridge), the galoot pins his romantic hopes on his mistaken idea of Anna’s virtue. “Is it dreaming I am?” Mat wonders, when he sees her gleaming blond head appear before him, offering a drink. (Everyone in the play other than Chris and Mat sizes her up in a flash.)

O’Neill enjoyed writing in dialect, and so the actors here must contend with all manner of thick-accent work, which makes comprehension tricky. Sturridge, a Londoner, chooses an impenetrable inflection (it could be Scouse, though his character says that he’s Irish), and d’Arcy James, among our finest musical-theatre actors, has a ball with his syncopated Swedish mannerisms. Williams, unfortunately, is so wrong-footed by the requirements of the period’s rhythms that her first heavily accented appearance, in a dockside saloon, is her most unsteady. In moments during the second half, though, when she’s less conscientiously Midwestern, she takes on an electric, fitful jangliness, which seems appropriate for a woman trying to re-start the cold engine of her life.

Unfortunately, Sturridge gives a counterintuitive performance, one so at odds with the play’s romance and the performances around him that it sinks the ship. O’Neill describes the coal stoker, in one of his many page-filling stage directions, as a “powerful, broad-chested six-footer . . . in the full power of his heavy-muscled, immense strength.” The trouble isn’t that Sturridge, who has a quicksilver, elven quality, has been cast against type; it’s that he interprets the bewildered, love-stunned lummox as a pallid, twitchy creep, crawling on his haunches like Caliban and wriggling as if he’s got an eel down his trousers. (The night I saw it, Mat wouldn’t stop fumbling with his pants—Anna, I thought, get out.) Kail emphasizes this odd disjunction by stacking the mostly unspeaking ensemble with bruisers, their rolled sleeves straining over yoked shoulders. They, alongside similarly capable-looking stagehands, haul elements of Christine Jones and Brett J. Banakis’s set around, totin’ platforms and heftin’ tables. Maybe Kail is unconcerned with realism and has asked Sturridge to play Mat’s inner self, the frail and contorting one he keeps hidden. But then what’s with all the stevedores from central casting?

Kail is best known for directing “Hamilton” and co-developing the television series “Fosse/Verdon,” which also starred Williams; the two married in 2020. Kail clearly has an abiding interest in dance-adjacent theatre. Here, he has Steven Hoggett choreograph the movement, which includes monkeylike capering from Mat—at one point, he extends a hesitant simian arm to Anna while crouching like a chimp on the floor—and the aforementioned stevedores. I have to assume, therefore, that Kail intends a deliberate elision between this work and O’Neill’s Expressionist “The Hairy Ape,” from 1922, which employs the same plot elements to a much different effect. In that play, too, an engine stoker, Yank, falls for a blonde, though he then turns violent after the anemic girl, who represents society’s upper crust, recoils.

The main character of “Anna Christie,” however, is not the stoker. (The clue is in the title.) Mat is no Yank, an animal waking to the presence of his cage, and Anna is no shrinking violet—she’s a resourceful survivor with a well-earned distrust of men who’s stubborn enough to try for love anyhow. Williams, a tense and withholding presence onstage, might yet have an Anna in her, but it’s hard to see in this production, hampered as she is by Kail’s staging and Sturridge’s baffling interpretation. (No sane woman would choose to date this guy.) You can nonetheless find fragments of her potential Anna. Williams has a lovely way of letting her face go slack whenever she’s calling on her deepest reserves of courage—she does it right before she tells the men the truth of her working past. O’Neill’s play imagines Anna as something of a Christ(ie) figure, and Williams works out how to show us the awful stillness she feels right before redemption. Is it enough to save us, too? Well, no. But it does, for a moment, penetrate the fog. ♦

The New Yorker doesn’t easily let go of the old stuff. Recently, our copy department retired the hyphen we’d kept in “in-box” for longer than anyone should keep anything in an inbox. But “teen-ager” clings to its appropriately awkward hyphen, and “coöperation” retains its diaeresis. (Don’t call it an umlaut.) My favorite still functioning relics are two fat binders of “Talk spots”—hundreds of postage-stamp-size drawings that appear at the tops of Talk of the Town pieces, which the cartoonist Otto Soglow drew from 1926 to 1970, to illustrate stories in the section, and which have (mostly) been paired with new Talk pieces ever since.

One of my first jobs at the magazine was to flip through these binders and pick decades-old drawings to run alongside some of our timeliest stories. It was astonishing how well these vintage vignettes continued to match the week’s news. Sure, over the years hemlines fluctuate; TV replaces radio; Nixon’s jowls droop. But something about the drawings’ look and tone is ageless. On a micro scale, they display the cheekiness and the reverence for the hyper-specific that make up the magazine’s DNA.

Soglow was born in Manhattan in 1900, and pretty much never left. He wanted to be an actor but settled for being a cartoonist, and was best known for his syndicated comic “The Little King,” a wordless strip about a rotund, charmingly immature monarch. Soglow’s first New Yorker cartoon was published nine months into the magazine’s existence, and his increasingly spare aesthetic, which eschewed text and favored a clean, elegant line, was a harbinger of a style that became immensely popular.

When Soglow died, in 1975, the magazine’s editor, William Shawn, wrote of his Talk spots, “He worked on these modest drawings with great seriousness, spending hours on each of them to get the meaning and the composition right.” Shawn describes Soglow as “a sweet-spirited, melancholy-looking, reticent man.” (His collected spots were published under the sweet-spirited, melancholy titles “Ho Hum” and “More Ho Hum,” although, per other accounts, Soglow was a bit of a party animal.)

But back to the spots. I recently dug up the Talk stories that originally ran alongside a handful of Soglow’s diminutive drawings—the images that most mystified or charmed me. A piece from the May 9, 1931, issue, accompanied by a skyscraper wearing what I always assumed were sunglasses, reads, “Too little emphasis was placed, at the opening of the Empire State Building, on the topmost tenant. It is significant that the world’s most magnificent architectural creation should be crowned by the Model Brassière Company. . . . We take off our hat to the architects and engineers who were able to lift a brassière company eleven hundred feet above the ground.”

A drawing of two naked people worshipping the sun was paired with a story commenting on the “great growth of nudist cults” (July 21, 1934). A spot of a sculptor carving what seems to be a duck was, in fact, drawn for a piece, from 1950, about a woman carving a duck out of a chunk of marble scavenged from the construction site of the N.Y.U. law-school building. (We’d be pleased to run such a story today!) A dinosaur-skeleton drawing long used to illustrate stories about the Natural History Museum first ran above a 1938 account of how the government was buying drab clothing for the needy. (The author deemed “blue suits as synonymous with Sunday, a day of relentless adult supervision when our spirit broke quietly in the Museum of Natural History.”)

And the baseball players holding musical instruments, from 1947? “The Yankees are going to sponsor a symphony program on the radio next season in order to get more ladies interested in baseball.” Meanwhile, a 1939 spot of someone filming a cowboy and a top-hatted fat cat first illustrated a piece about Presidential candidates who wanted movies made about them. Our columnist’s counterpoint: “This country loves dull Presidents, who give it a certain feeling of security and repose.” Here’s to more ho hum. ♦

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Andrew Martin reads his story “Risk, Discipline,” from the December 22, 2025, issue of the magazine. Martin is the author of the novel “Early Work,” and the story collection “Cool for America.” His new novel, “Down Time,” from which this story was adapted, will be published in March.

When Violet and I finally decided to get married, I was in the middle of a depression so deep it had developed into something more like psychosis. I felt like I was pretending to be myself. I don’t mean I was playing “the role” of the husband-to-be, the good son, the whatever. I mean I was going around thinking, What would I do right now if I were Malcolm?

I didn’t feel like myself, but I wasn’t inhabiting—I don’t know—a persona or anything. I was a glitchy, mutating thing, a vague C.G.I. blur from the last act of a late-nineties blockbuster. I felt like multiple selves at once and also like maybe I didn’t exist.

We were hungry for joy. “Joy” was not the kind of word either of us had used unironically in the past, but some of our irony had been scoured off by loneliness and terror. We were having trouble being funny, except in abrupt, gallowsy ways. Violet’s emergency medical instructions, taped to the refrigerator in March, included a funeral “do not play” list that was just “Livin’ on a Prayer,” “Takin’ Care of Business,” and “any version, rendition, or interpolation of ‘Forever Young.’ ” It was offensive at that time to aspire to happiness, at least out loud, but people still seemed O.K. with the abstract idea of joy, as long as it was private, temporary. Fugitive.

We weren’t capable of being all that happy, anyway. It was December. We were in the city. Over the past year, many of Violet’s patients had died, were still dying. We did not wear sweatpants or binge anything besides alcohol. We weren’t allowed in anybody’s “pod,” because Violet was a hospital physician with a consequently high risk of exposure. So we worked and we worried and we walked. We saw our friends in the park sometimes, six feet apart in the spring but creeping closer over time until we were practically on top of one another, desperate for proximity. We saw our parents on their porches, wore masks when we went inside, peed on their lawns when case counts were bad. We made and saved money by working all the time and not going anywhere and by investing in stocks that profited from the world’s pain.

The classes I taught weren’t helping with my despair. My little window in the corner of the screen looked like a lesser Morandi painting, the blobby brown bottle of me against a thick beige background. I always looked farther away than the people I was talking to. Filling the screen with my gigantic face did not improve matters.

It was a hard time for knowing whether one was experiencing a psychiatric event or responding normally to what was happening. Violet, indefatigable through the most desperate early months, had started showing signs of exhaustion in June, when she was charged with simultaneously starting a long-COVID recovery unit and a COVID hospice service. I became concerned when she started complaining about a dying patient’s “entitled attitude.”

On the Saturday the election was finally called, we briefly danced in the street to marching-band covers of songs from the seventies. Cases went up. One rainy night in late November, we ate takeout jerk chicken in our friend Kenny’s apartment with all the windows open, in our coats, because he was moving out of the city forever in the morning and it was my birthday. When we got home, Violet tied me to the bed and brought out all the stuff, but gave up when I couldn’t stop sobbing.

We were afraid of each other and even more afraid of ourselves. I wanted to exist in other times. I wanted to be a footloose, promiscuous woman in the early two-thousands. I wanted to just be sick already, or on a goat farm in New Zealand, or dead.

So why not get married?

I didn’t have strong objections to our specific marriage. The institution is politically objectionable, of course, and intellectually bankrupt. And it did seem absurd to me, given my current emotional and/or psychiatric disposition, that I was allowed to consent to such a thing as being legally committed to another person. But I also knew, in some squirming, buried part of my brain, that being married to Violet was what past-me, and probably future-me, assuming I eventually returned to myself, would want.

In sex, at least, we’d got closer to some kind of mutuality, taking turns wielding authority over each other, allowing whole days and nights to become wide-ranging Stanford prison experiments. We both preferred being compliant to giving instruction, but I found things to enjoy about both. Taking turns being in charge seemed like good practice for our future together, and for our professional lives, too. To wit: even if it was easier to simply let the world have its way with you—getting stiffed on predatory adjunct contracts, enduring the condescension of older male doctors—it was worth remembering that other people might share the impulse to be put in their place, might even accept you demanding centrality if it gave them the chance to perform submission.

Well. On further reflection, reluctantly tying up your partner and summoning the courage to ask your boss for a raise might not have very much in common.

Because of the plague, the marriage bureaus in the city were all closed. You could do the license part by video easily enough, but city clerks were booked through January for the virtual ceremonies, and we didn’t want to wait. We had been to many weddings where friends had empowered other friends to say the special words, but we were opposed to doing this, for reasons we couldn’t articulate. Our weird parents, or maybe just the Catholic upbringings we’d endured at their behest, had given us a fetish for institutional legitimacy. Violet would have liked a church wedding, even in an empty church, but almost as soon as we started dating I told her that such a thing was never going to happen. It felt politically commendable at the time to have everything handled by the state, to receive the same mediocre treatment as everybody else.

And so, to obtain the bureaucratic indifference I desired, we had to travel upstate, to the land of the custom and the rustic. We chose a town where we were able to find a relatively cheap rental house and a clerk available to marry us in two weeks, when Violet had a few days off. Despite our best efforts, we were going to be, in the end, two more thirtysomethings from Brooklyn getting married in the Hudson Valley.

“Are you sure you’re O.K. with all this?” Violet said, as we filled out the marriage-license application online.

“I think so,” I said. I tried to think of the things one was supposed to think about when getting married. “Oh, do we know what are, like, the money laws in New York? With marriage? Like . . . do we get each other’s money if we get divorced or die and all that?”

“I guess so,” she said. “I mean, in some capacity, probably. That sounds good to me.”

“Which part?”

“Oh, just . . . I don’t know, that we just kind of get each other’s stuff. Like, now—and later. Are you going to be a jerk if we have to get divorced?”

“Not any more than I already am,” I said. “Maybe if you did something really bad I would . . . I don’t know . . . be very mad at you, I’m sure. But I’m not going to demand your money. That doesn’t seem right.”

“I didn’t have time to fetch that ball you threw yesterday, so I just ordered you a new one.”

Cartoon by Pia Guerra and Ian Boothby

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“Right, that’s how I feel. We’ll just figure it out like regular people.”

“I’m sure I’m going to die before we can get divorced, anyway,” I said.

“Cool. Love that,” she said.

Our parents were not thrilled that there would be no wedding for them to cry at, but we had conditioned them to have very low expectations, having been together for five years and refused even to discuss marriage before now. They probably would have bet on “break up in a sea of recrimination” over “randomly elope during a horrifying wave of illness,” but it was good to keep them on their toes. We promised to FaceTime them before and afterward, and said that we’d all have some champagne and celebrate together “when it was safe.”

I worried, of course, that I was going to bring Violet down. Her parents worried about that, too, because she was, objectively, great, and also their precious only daughter, which was still a thing in some quarters. My parents worried about what would happen to me if we broke up. They’d urged me to propose since the day after we met. Her miraculous attachment to me had persisted, and I was never, ever going to do better.

From a certain angle, though, I wasn’t so bad. I’d managed to write and publish a novel. Violet’s parents had graciously chosen not to read it, which had spared us all a few embarrassing conversations, but their abstention had also deprived me of a cathartic victory over them for not believing in me. My father expressed a generalized pride. My mother ventured that she wished there wasn’t quite so much drug use and bad language, but she was pleased she’d been able to solve the mystery at a satisfying point in the narrative, before it was revealed. (It was the headmaster.)

Now, when I managed to write, I felt like an archeologist working on a minor site, excavating the past just to keep busy. I wrote about the people I knew, had known. I tried to tell myself that what I was writing would make some kind of sense eventually, given the times, the state of things. Maybe the traditional novel was dead. Maybe I would help kill it! My students did not think the traditional novel was dead, and I did not work very hard to convince them otherwise. The traditional novel would probably always be with us, like Republicans.

That year, we’d spent a lot of time with Patrick and Jocelyn, a couple who lived down the street from us, sane, decent people with whom we shared tastes and an outlook on life, though they generally seemed much more . . . “settled” is the word, I suppose, than we were. They had a generously proportioned stoop and access to the building’s back yard, so we passed many hours together outside, in all kinds of weather, drinking heavy beers and worrying.

Patrick and Jocelyn talked openly to us about their dissatisfactions with each other, their conflicts with their parents, their worries about their careers, and they did so in a way that didn’t feel burdensome. Rather, these subjects were presented as interesting conversational gambits, giving them the opportunity to riff and expand on certain preset themes, as if they were podcast hosts. Being around them loosened us up, though we couldn’t quite shed our deep-seated aversion to sharing our actual feelings out loud. We saved that for passive-aggressive text messages.

We invited them to come upstate with us for the weekend and bear witness, and at first they enthusiastically agreed. But hesitation quickly crept in as we tried to make plans. They were supposed to see their parents the week after and didn’t want to infect them; cases were going up again; Jocelyn had an unspecified medical condition (the severity of which fluctuated with the news) that put her at particular risk. Maybe they could just drive up for the afternoon, toast us outside, and then go back to the city? The kindest thing to do was to gently disinvite them, telling a white lie about other friends who lived closer “feeling left out.” Would they be terribly upset if we celebrated with them when we got back, instead? This probably saved the friendship.

We felt sheepish about asking other, similarly cautious city friends. We thought about some combination of our siblings, but we had six between us, and we knew it would make our parents feel even more neglected if we chose some favored assortment over them. Then I thought of Grant and Chelsea. They were, fundamentally, both game and chill. They had moved upstate three years ago—not terribly close to where we were getting married, but still—and we’d seen them only sporadically since then. Grant and I had gone to college together, and we texted frequently, mostly about books and movies and, incidentally, our lives. He liked things that I liked, though he leaned a bit toward the normie end of the spectrum: handsomely made, widely released movies by Tarantino, Lynch, and Nolan; somewhat unfashionable New Journalists like Mailer and Wolfe; and the more theatrical members of the alternative-music canon (Nick Cave, Tom Waits). He made his money as a remote I.T. specialist (I did not ask questions), but he was also the co-owner of a small craft distillery called Blind Love Spirits, natch.

Chelsea was more of a wild card, a sculptor who specialized in small molded-plastic figurines engaged in hardcore, sometimes physically impossible sex acts. These had the look of action figures from children’s cartoons, except they were often naked or decked out in fetish gear and contorted into alternately abject and dominant positions. In the time I’d known her, these pieces had gone from being an eyebrow-raising hobby to a full-time career. At an exhibition of hers that Violet and I had attended years before, Chelsea had greeted us with a gag in her mouth and her hands cuffed behind her back, in the company of a very tall woman in a pink latex dress. “What do you say?” her minder said, tugging Chelsea’s hair, and Chelsea sputtered something that sounded like “Thank you for coming,” before giving a curtsy and being led away. The action figures—some photographed, some painted, some there in the plastic flesh—did their things, and halfway through the evening Chelsea was uncuffed and “allowed” to serve us drinks on a metal tray. It was impossible for me to tell whether any of this made for good art or was just very hot as an over-all situation. Chelsea, when not in artist mode, was quiet and even shy, a dichotomous phenomenon I’d encountered in performers often enough that I didn’t find it all that surprising. She was slight, with very long blond hair and unremarkable features that were transformed when “in character” by heavy mascara, eyeliner, and black or blood-red lipstick. Grant presented as a generally vanilla person, but surely there was something more going on under the surface, given that he was with her.

Violet didn’t know whether she wanted this unlikely pair to be our only wedding guests, but I was energized by the possible infusion of chaos. We always had fun with them, I reminded her. They’d given us just the right amount of acid at that experimental-music festival. Grant was a good cook, and he would bring us nice booze from his distillery. They would serve as a kind of carbon offset to our participation in an insidious bourgeois institution. Sure, they weren’t our “best friends,” but so what? The apparent randomness of their selection would make our actual best friends, who lived in Seattle and Virginia, feel less excluded—clearly, they would understand, there were other criteria at work besides all-time belovedness. Violet, probably because I hadn’t been this animated about anything in at least a year, agreed.

I called Grant, who was down, “absolutely.” He and Chelsea were “pretty over” COVID. They didn’t not believe in it, he clarified, they just didn’t care that much about getting it. I wondered whether I should mention this to Violet, but it was, in truth, closer to her own perspective on the situation than mine. It wasn’t that she didn’t care but rather that she was tired of worrying and talking about it, having spent the past nine and a half months doing so. I had more anxiety, most of it centered on the fairly nebulous idea of “getting other people sick,” but I was easily swayed by the confidence of others.

We started north on Friday morning. I’d found a binder full of CDs that I’d been carting around the country since I was sixteen. “We’ll listen to these in the car!” I said. “Maybe the house will have a CD player!” Making an abrupt life-altering decision was giving me a major infusion of energy. We should have got married years ago! Violet had cut my hair, ineptly but with great enthusiasm, a month earlier, and it had grown out enough that it now looked almost normal. She hadn’t had a haircut of any kind since February, but I liked the added length. She looked like a member of Bon Jovi before they got big or of the Replacements after they did.

Stuck in traffic in upper Manhattan, I grew restless with my collection of high-school-era emo and switched to the radio. We heard the end of Bob Dylan’s “Gates of Eden,” followed, without commentary, by “Mississippi” and then by “Blind Willie McTell.”

“Wait, did Dylan die?” I said. “Check your phone. We can’t get married if Dylan died.”

“Seriously?” she said. “You don’t really mean that.”

“Just check. I don’t know if I mean it or not yet.”

“I’m not going to check if you actually mean that. I won’t seal my own fate.”

“Would you actually still want to? Wouldn’t that cast a shadow over everything?”

“There’s already a shadow over everything. What’s one more shadow? Brittany Murphy died on the day of Carla’s wedding.”

“Right, and they got divorced. Please just check. I’m really worried.”

The radio was playing “I Want You.” Less death-haunted than the others, but there was still that line about the undertaker.

“There’s no indication on the internet that he died,” she said. “Maybe it’s his birthday?”

“His birthday’s in May,” I said.

“Well, it sounds like someone is just playing your favorite recording artist on your favorite radio station. Seems like a good sign to me.”

It seemed, to me, like a trap. All my enthusiasm for the trip was gone. What were we doing? There was no way it could ever be a good sign to hear “Mississippi” on the radio.

Eventually, the d.j. came on the air—not the regular Friday-morning d.j., I noted, some fill-in—and explained that she “just felt like hearing some Bob on this beautiful, sunny December day. Don’t worry, he is A-O.K., as far as I know, at least, but thank you for all of your concerned calls and messages.”

“Well, at least I wasn’t the only one who was worried,” I said.

“Are you really that nervous?” Violet said. “I don’t want to feel like I’m making you do something.”

“I just want to reserve the right to respect signs and portents,” I said. “This is how people have decided things since the dawn of time.”

“Well, I think we can also make decisions based on what we actually want to do.”

We listened to the radio until we lost reception, then switched to a podcast about the runoffs in Georgia. If we’d lost the Presidential election, I realized suddenly, there was no way we’d be getting married now.

The farther we got from the city, the better I felt. Like everyone who has ever lived in New York, every time we drove even an hour north, we started imagining how much happier and calmer we’d be if we lived upstate. And every time we returned we felt immediate relief to be back among the sirens and the floridly insane.

The house we’d rented was, typically, much closer to the road than it appeared in the listing but otherwise moderately charming and lived-in, which placed it above many of the barely decorated, instructions-festooned places we’d booked in the past. This one did have two troubling paintings, in the kitchen and living room, of dogs with sexy human-lady bodies, or perhaps they were sexy human ladies with dog heads. But there was also a working turntable with at least a couple of listenable records (“Something Else by the Kinks,” an intriguing late-seventies Grace Jones) and a “welcome” bottle of wine. So, on the whole, a win.

We went upstairs and Violet fucked me forcefully in the small, undecorated bedroom there. An hour of that and we both felt secure in ourselves again, ready to take on the project of being legally bound.

Grant and Chelsea were due at four, so we showered and tried to look like people who sometimes interacted socially with others. Violet was better at this than I was. I needed to shave but couldn’t summon the mental strength such an act would require. Violet assured me my beard looked fine, but I could tell she didn’t really think so. This was a problem that we had sometimes, my not believing what she said, despite her insistence. Sometimes this was because she said the opposite of what she actually thought.

Twenty minutes past their expected arrival time, I heard tires on the gravel driveway. I went out to the front porch and waved like an imbecile, to indicate excitement. Chelsea emerged from the driver’s seat, unsmiling in black sunglasses, a leather jacket, and a spiked dog collar. Grant came out from the passenger seat, lugubrious at first, then putting on a showy grin through his beard when he saw my own exaggerated enthusiasm. He was dressed in an almost militantly preppy way—a gray blazer, partially unbuttoned pink shirt, boat shoes with no socks. The weather was unusually—or maybe not so unusually, now—mild for December, but still. Maybe this was just his idea of “wedding casual.” He slung a couple of bags over his shoulders while Chelsea removed a small cardboard box from the back seat.

“Can I give you a hug?” Grant said, inches from my face.

“It’s an awareness campaign.”

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“Oh, I suppose!” I said, and embraced him.

“Hey, dude,” Chelsea said. “Congratulations on everything.”

She gave me a tight squeeze with her free arm and then handed me the box.

“It’s Gwyneth Paltrow’s head,” she said.

“Surprisingly light!”

“Yeah, it just has some goop in it or whatever her thing is called.”

“You know it’s goop,” Grant said.

“I’ll open it inside,” I said.

Once in the house, I was momentarily overwhelmed. I’d been in domestic spaces with other people so rarely in the past year that Grant and Chelsea’s bodies seemed huge, their faces and gestures hyperreal. I felt crowded but also comforted. People! These were people. Inside the box was a tiny store-bought cake, with “Congratulations” written in shaky minuscule script.

“Aw, you guys,” Violet said. “Was the drive O.K.?”

“Sure, when I was driving,” Chelsea said. “When I was allowed to drive.”

“Right, I was imposing Sharia law,” Grant said.

“No, you were just being really aggressive about controlling the vehicle, with no clear reason for it.”

“I just thought that maybe since you were very, very stoned and I was not, it would make more sense for me to ‘control the vehicle.’ In your totally normal words.”

I didn’t offer an opinion on the matter. I always preferred for Violet to drive when I’d been drinking or drugging even a little bit, and occasionally she was annoyed by this, thinking I was using a minor technicality to avoid a task I didn’t like doing regardless of my chemical consumption. But I was a bad enough driver that it really was best to play the margins.

“Let’s have some champagne,” Violet said. “No more travelling for a while.”

We showed them to their room on the first floor—spartan, yes, but this wasn’t a luxury wellness retreat—then opened one of the expensive bottles my father had had delivered to our apartment door. Fancy champagne was his default response to life news, a habit I certainly appreciated, even though I could hardly tell André from the decent stuff. But who doesn’t like expensive things?

To that end, Chelsea produced some cocaine, which she dubiously referred to as her “dowry,” and, though it was not our drug of choice, we did a couple of lines, Violet skimming hers so lightly as to be mostly gestural. Depression, it was dawning on me, might simply be the absence of champagne and drugs, and friendly acquaintances with whom to share them. It soon became apparent that no one would be cooking, so we had a forbidding number of mediocre pizzas delivered, of which we collectively ate about a half-dozen slices. We needed to save room for other things.

“Honestly, I was pretty surprised when you said you were getting married,” Grant said, leaning back on the couch.

“We’ve been together for many years,” I said.

“Exactly. I thought you’d just ride it out, keep things a little ambiguous.”

“I can’t remember,” Violet said. “Are you guys married?”

“For the insurance,” Chelsea said. “But we’re not ‘married’ married.”

“She’s married to the scene,” Grant said.

“I’d say more like ‘devoted to the community,’ ” Chelsea said.

“You mean art?” Violet said.

“Art, kink, the intersection. It’s all very, you know, involved. Physically, emotionally. Grant’s into it but not in, like, an official capacity, so he has to let me go where I need to go. So classic-formula marriage is kind of out.”

“You guys are kind of kinky, right?” Grant said.

I couldn’t remember what I’d told him. I’d probably been trying to seem like less of a square after one of Chelsea’s events, and disclosed more than I should have about our sporadic pegging and bondage sessions. Violet was hardly a prude, but she tended to prefer that the details of our sex life—our intimate life in general—be parcelled out at her discretion.

“We do our best,” Violet said, without evident distress. “Wouldn’t want to claim any stolen valor. And it’s all pretty monogamous. You’re putting in the real work.”

Chelsea nodded vigorously, took a sip of champagne.

“It is work, really—not the activity, that’s the fun part, but the staying open, staying sensitive to what you want and need. It’s discipline but also the opposite of discipline, you know? Because, if it becomes routine, then what’s the fucking point? You might as well be pushing a stroller in Park Slope.”

This was, of course, more or less our assumed end point, regardless of whether or not we “wanted” it.

“So how do you stay open?” Violet said.

“Risk?” Grant said after a pause.

“Yes,” Chelsea said. “You have to not be afraid of losing things.”

This shouldn’t have been profound—there was nothing original about the idea—but, in that particular moment, I understood that it was true. I was afraid, yes. I endured, through my unhappiness and through historical disruption, and I took pride in that, but I had not actually risked anything besides, arguably, through sheer physical inactivity and alcohol consumption, my health. Everything I did, artistically and romantically and otherwise, was oriented around simply not losing what I already had.

“And how do you do that?” I said.

Chelsea stared deep into my eyes for a moment, then laughed. “That’s what separates the champs from the tramps, boyo!”

She rummaged through her oversized purse, all traces of her earlier annoyance gone. “Another very small line, perhaps? Because marriage?”

“What will you give me if I can provide incriminating evidence about other people on the naughty list?”

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I shrugged a “Why not?” as Violet shook her head. I knew this was not the kind of risk we were talking about. Doing semi-hard drugs when offered them was not, as I sometimes allowed myself to fantasize, showing up on a leash in a leather dress to a sex rave, or finding out where the nearest sex rave was, or even shyly asking someone whether sex raves really existed. Someone else’s cocaine was a pretty good synecdoche for all the non-life-expanding risks I’d been taking my whole life. But: it was what was available.

We drained the good champagne and a much cheaper bottle that Chelsea and Grant had brought. We had some beer and whiskey in the kitchen, and a special “rare batch” of Grant’s distillery’s bourbon, but we were going to have to replenish our supply soon if we kept up this pace. The session with the justice of the peace wasn’t until the next afternoon.

Chelsea told us about a video project she was working on, a kind of updated, role-reversed riff on the old Vito Acconci thing, in this case with Chelsea tied up under the floorboards and visitors encouraged to masturbate in the gallery space to a live video feed of her. She wasn’t sure whether she was reclaiming power or “ceding the last of it,” she said.

Violet, after listening to this, became uncharacteristically candid about her desire for “a less mediated sexual existence,” arguing, with somewhat wandering logic, that there was no reason this shouldn’t be compatible with “a classic marriage.”

“There can’t be good sex without secrets,” she concluded. “And marriage is all about secrets.”

It was the first time she’d said that, though it wasn’t an inaccurate read of our relationship. Maybe she was fucking around with her co-worker Akhil, or somebody new, on her phone again. I didn’t mind what I didn’t know, really, but, now that she’d said that, it wasn’t really a secret.

“I used to think that,” Chelsea said. “But now I wonder if it’s kind of reactionary. Like, the most radical position is just total honesty, right? Why should you have to hide? It just abets the people who want to cover up actually fucked-up shit and make it seem cool and transgressive.”

Violet’s eyes were wide with attention, which I knew meant she disagreed completely.

“I guess I’m not interested in policing people’s relationships,” she said.

Chelsea rolled her eyes.

“I got my ass kicked in June for screaming in a cop’s face,” she said. “Fuck the police. Hard.”

Violet cackled, and the tension broke. She’d already had more to drink than usual, by quite a lot, and I’d worried things were going to get ugly. But she just nuzzled up to me gently as Grant described the laborious process of getting his liquor into various stores and bars. When talk of another round started up, she declared that she was going to bed.

“Don’t stay up all night, boychik,” she said to me. “You gotta be at least a little bit lucid for the legalities.”

“Oh, I’ll be sharp as a button,” I said. “Of that you can be sure.”

“Hmm,” she said. “Chelsea, you’re in charge. I’m not saying no more cocaine and alcohol, but . . . use your judgment.”

“Yes, mistress,” Chelsea said. When we heard her door close, Chelsea silently set out three more thin lines, which we handled with professional efficiency, and Grant replenished our glasses with bourbon.

“So,” Chelsea said. She fixed her significant blue eyes on me.

“Malcolm. What is it you actually want.”

“What’s that?”

“Why did you invite us here? For your wedding. What exactly is it that you’re trying to get out of this?”

I turned to Grant, hoping he might give me a hint as to what to do, but he just raised his eyebrows, implicitly echoing her questions.

“I like you guys?” I said. “You’re fun. You’re reliable. I knew you wouldn’t make an undue fuss about things.”

“We’re fun,” Chelsea said, deadpan. “What makes us fun?”

I shifted in my seat. The dog-woman painting stared down at me in judgment.

“Well, you, uh, are very generous with your substances, obviously. And you’re, you know . . . liberated. Open to possibilities. Like you were saying earlier.”

“Yes, exactly,” Chelsea said. “It’s about sex. That’s what we represent to you. Or what I do, at least. So. What do you want?”

I was too fucked up for this line of questioning.

“You mean . . . now?”

She cracked up, then covered her mouth with the back of her hand. I hadn’t realized how crooked her bottom teeth were until she did that.

“Yeah, like, ‘You want one last premarital threesome before you take the plunge?’ No, dude, I mean, I feel like when you get fucked up you’re always trying to tell us in these oblique ways that you’re a freak. I don’t think you’re just being prurient. But I think you’re kind of afraid, or embarrassed, and hoping I’m going to give you some kind of dispensation or something.”

“O.K.”

“Am I on to something?”

“Maybe. But I think you could say that about anybody.”

“Why are you getting married?”

She had a not-unkind smirk on her face, echoed, apologetically, it seemed to me, by Grant. I didn’t find it as rude as I might have. I believed she was sincerely curious, which counts for a lot, and I’d also hardly been indoors unmasked with anyone besides Violet in months. It would have taken a lot for me to shut down a conversation.

“Devotion?” I said.

“Sure.”

“Violet wants joy.”

“Ah. And are you feeling joy?”

“I mean, as much as I ever do. Do you have, I don’t know, some advice or something?”

“You must be avoiding something awfully big to be this productive.”

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“I just wonder why you don’t try to get whatever it is you want. Like, why you don’t do what would make you happy.”

“What, so you’re a therapist?”

“Everybody’s a therapist now, bro. Especially after this many drinks. Come on, drink with me, think with me.”

She poured all three of us another slug of whiskey and motioned for me to drink up. She left hers untouched. Grant hadn’t said a word in what felt like an hour. This was the Chelsea show, and it was apparently on until closing time.

“Look, shit can get pretty weird in the context of a long-term monogamous relationship, for sure,” Chelsea said. “Or so they say. I think things have been way more exciting for us”—Grant nodded enthusiastically—“when we’ve been willing to be more, like, out with our desires and interests.”

She caught Grant’s eye. There was a brief pause before he snapped his fingers crisply. She immediately got up from her chair and sat cross-legged on the floor at Grant’s feet, her hands on her knees, facing forward.

“She can be really well behaved,” Grant said. “She just needs rules.”

“Oh,” I said.

Chelsea maintained a neutral expression, but I could see the hint of a smile in her eyes, which were studiously not meeting mine.

“She likes to be out of commission sometimes. It gives her a chance to reflect, to want things. It’s good for her. Definitely good for me.”

“This is, like, your party trick?” I said.

He shrugged.

“We’re both really evangelical about not repressing things. We’ve had a lot of time this year to get the dynamic right. Life doesn’t have to be so hard.”

“Everything in the world is going to hell,” I said.

“Yes. So we’re seizing the opportunity to be happy while we still can.”

He turned his gaze to Chelsea, who was sitting perfectly still with her hands on her knees, waiting for further instruction. She did indeed look happy. Beatific, even.

“Isn’t that right, baby doll?” Grant said.

She gave a shiver of a nod, stared straight ahead.

“Hey, do you want to kiss her?” Grant said. “That’s allowed, on our side at least. Chelsea’s always thought you were cute.”

“Really?” I said. Chelsea widened her eyes slightly, raised her eyebrows. Risk, right. But still.

“What if I just . . .” I said. “Would it be O.K. if I just, um, gently ran my hand through your hair a little bit instead, Chels? I think that might be more where I’m at right now.”

She shifted her attention to Grant in query.

“Sure,” Grant said. “I don’t see why not. That seems like a very nice thing to do.”

I sank to the floor and got on my knees facing her. At this distance, I could see how thick her makeup was, and I caught a sharp hint of her garlic-and-peppermint smell, surprisingly hippieish, given the punk vibes. Now that I was here, I wished I had accepted the offer to kiss her, but it felt too late to change my mind. I lifted my hand and registered a minute flinch, terrible and intimate, from which she quickly recovered. She closed her eyes, and I gently ran my hand over the back of her skull. Her hair was thin and feathery and dry. She leaned her head back into my hand like a cat, and I felt, or imagined, her body vibrating in a light purr. When I reached the bottom of her mane, I rested my hand softly on her back. I could have sworn I felt her heartbeat.

I stumbled off to bed a half hour later, after we’d shared a skinny spliff to settle ourselves. Grant held the joint for Chelsea, who remained silent and still, and instructed her on her intake and exhale. When I told them I needed to sleep, Grant promised that they’d clean up before they went to bed. When I glanced back, I saw Chelsea gathering the bottles in her arms while Grant remained seated, watching her.

In the bedroom, I was surprised to find the bedside lamp still on and Violet with her eyes closed but, to my trained eye, not asleep.

“What’s up?” I said.

She didn’t respond, so I sat down on the edge of the bed and put my hand on her hip. “Did you hear all that?”

“What?” she said. “Oh, no. I couldn’t really hear you. I mean, I heard voices but not words. Was there drama?”

No good sex without secrets.

“Just more of the same,” I said. “Have you been up this whole time?”

“On and off,” she said. She sat up against the headboard and slid gently away from me. “Just thinking. Overthinking.”

I was afraid to say it out loud but forced myself to do it. “Are you having . . . second thoughts?” I said.

“No!” she said. It sounded genuine. “I mean, I don’t think so. Not about us, at least. But I think . . . I don’t know.”

“What? Tell me.”

She put her head in her hands and didn’t say anything for a long moment.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about this,” she said softly into her hands, “and I just . . . I don’t think I want to be a doctor right now. I’m really, really tired, and I don’t think I can keep doing it. I’m so sick of all of it. But we need the money. And the hospital definitely needs people. So. I feel really stuck.”

I experienced the most significant surge of joy—actual joy—I’d felt since long before the pandemic started. It was relief, but it was more than that. It was a way forward.

“Oh, God,” I said. “You’ve done your part.”

She shook her head. “It’s cowardly. I know I’m just burned out. And we’d be so broke. How would we be able to afford a kid?”

“If it gets too warm, you can just get rid of that guy.”

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We had not, officially, decided we were going to have a kid. Or had we?

“Lots of non-doctors manage to have kids, somehow,” I said.

“Not ones with six-figure medical-school debt.”

I paused, trying to determine the correct angle of approach. It was true that I would not be of significant help paying down her debt—our debt, probably, after tomorrow, once we looked into how the money thing worked—anytime soon. A lot seemed to depend on my response.

“I know I haven’t been good at making money,” I said. “Or saving money. Anything to do with money. But I want to be. Some people liked my book. Regular people. Maybe it should be a series. I’ll write another one. A trilogy! People fucking love trilogies. And we can, um, budget. I’ll buy fewer books. And drinks.”

She sighed, but there was a softening in her face. Her jaw unclenched, at least a little bit.

“I know you want to do all those things,” she said. “That’s not the problem.”

I got in the bed, and we curled up into each other.

“Maybe I just need a break,” she said. “A sabbatical.”

“You know what gets you a paid sabbatical,” I mumbled into her hair.

“Right,” Violet said. “The government says I get a baby vacation!”

She turned to face me and touched my cheek gently, something I could not remember her ever having done before.

“I know you’re miserable,” she said. “I think it’s going to get better once I figure out my shit.”

It somehow came as a surprise that she knew how unhappy I was. Or rather, since I was always unhappy, I thought I had successfully disguised the fact that I was currently more unhappy than usual. But maybe I was not, contrary to my recent assumptions, invisible.

“Maybe we should stick together and also change everything about our lives,” I said. “Chelsea and Grant had some good ideas.”

“Oh?” she said.

“Risk,” I said. “And discipline.”

“Right. Which comes first?”

“Well. Whichever you want.”

“You want me to be more like Chelsea?” Violet said.

“You know I want to be the Chelsea,” I said.

“Hmm,” she said. “Maybe once you bring in that money you’ve been talking about.”

I knew she didn’t think I was serious, but I was. I could do it, I thought. Or, well. Either that or we’d get divorced.

In all the pictures from the twenty-minute marriage ceremony, you can see a bright-green exit sign and a fire extinguisher mounted on the wall—such, I suppose, are the perils of municipal regulations. The light in the town hall was dim, but at least it was an old building, with lots of polished wood everywhere. My jacket was wrinkled, my hair a mess, but Violet looked fantastic in the distinctly nontraditional yellow sweater dress she’d insisted on wearing, and I managed to get a few good shots of her outside, on her own, holding some expensive flowers we’d bought in Hudson. The justice of the peace, a tall, bald, white-bearded man named Clive, performed his duties with kindness and efficiency, and he let the two of us take our masks off for the ceremony. We each said a few heartfelt sentences, Violet’s much more articulate than mine. It’s possible that I am capable of being sincere only extemporaneously. Whatever I said was true, but I’m also glad it wasn’t recorded for posterity. In the pictures, Grant is wearing a well-cut navy suit, Chelsea a revealing white (Chelsea!) lace thing that looks like expensive French underwear. You can’t make out the ball gag under Chelsea’s face mask, unless you know to look. ♦

This is drawn from “Down Time.”

Trends in restaurants are like trends in art: cumulative, ambient, much more evident in retrospect than they are in the chaos of the present. If 2024 was the year that the French resurgence really took hold, bathing New York City in cream and caviar, maybe 2025 was the year of the scrappy, auteurish indie: restaurants with tight, potent, personal points of view (and tight, nearly impossible-to-get-into dining rooms). I’m thinking of places like Sunn’s, Ha’s Snack Bar, and Bong, where the relational experience of having a meal is less about being a person at a table and more about being a person in a room—being part of something, a moment, a place. For every timid, focus-grouped, over-designed brand expansion, there were half a dozen green shoots of passionate, community-facing, community-building dining rooms and takeout counters. On balance, this was an awfully good year for restaurants. I mean, yes, it was also a horrible one—beset by the chilling, wide-ranging effects of tariff uncertainty and vituperative ICE raids, and the rising costs of real estate, equipment, and ingredients—but the culinary world moved forward so relentlessly, so creatively nonetheless.

2025 in Review

New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.

But the following is a list of best dishes, not of best restaurants. Thinking about the year in terms of individual plates is always a challenge for me, and also a thrill. So much of one’s experience at a restaurant is contextual, dependent on the arc and flow of a meal, and singling out any one specific creation or sensory experience forces me to take stock in a more granular, almost animalistic way. Which dishes gave me a jolt of surprise? Which made me close my eyes with joy? Which lit up my synapses with sheer pleasure and satiety? No dish or bite can exist in a total vacuum: I think the very best single thing I put in my mouth all year was a regular old strawberry, raw and red, but so jewel-like, so sweet and flavorful that the flesh almost betrayed hints of vanilla and cream. The berry was part of a brunch-time fruit plate at Gjelina—though, importantly, it was the Gjelina in Venice Beach, where the restaurant is sun-drenched and low-slung, and not the new multistory location that opened in New York this year and almost immediately disappeared into the beige, luxe blandness of its ritzy NoHo block. I think, too, about the cucumber salad served at Golden Hof, the terrific new midtown Korean restaurant from the owners of downtown’s wonderful Golden Diner. The dish is a beautiful, arguably brilliant mess, like two salads in one, with crisp cukes dressed in a burned-sesame vinaigrette, and fresh cilantro tossed in a dressing made with puckery gochugaru, combined in a bowl with a shower of crispy fried garlic. Eaten on the restaurant’s main level, in the louder, more casual bar area, it’s one of the most raucous, exciting vegetable dishes I’ve had in recent memory. Unfortunately, the austerity and elegance of the downstairs dining room acts as a dampener, hushing the salad’s brashness and sapping much of the fun. All dishes, inevitably, are products of their environment.

Nevertheless! Here, in no particular order, are a dozen of the best dishes I ate this year, considered more or less on their own terms. (Respectably, for me, only three of them are sandwiches.)

Sable au Caviar Beurre Blanc at Chateau Royale

In a restaurant town flooded with Frenchness, Chateau Royale offers a welcome sense of cheeky self-awareness, with a backward-looking menu that embraces all the Gallic pomp and dairy fat of an earlier age. Like most other things on the menu, this dish, a piece of ultra-silky sablefish dressed with a caviar-studded butter sauce, isn’t original—indeed, Chateau Royale’s take is specifically inspired by a dish served at L’Ambroisie, in Paris—but it feels somehow shockingly fresh and modern. The edges of the fish fillet are crisp and golden, the sauce is glossy and feather-light. This is how old-fashioned opulence should feel: not heavy but illuminating, and joyous.

Peas & Carrots at the View

The view at the View, the reborn revolving restaurant atop the Marriott Marquis in Times Square, isn’t always terribly breathtaking—about a quarter of the time, your table is facing grids of windows from adjacent offices buildings—and getting up there, via the mega-hotel’s tiers of lobbies and sub-lobbies, is a real slog. But I haven’t stopped thinking about this unassuming side dish, a playful riff on the freezer-aisle cliché, featuring large, faceted hunks of orange carrot, and green peas as zippy and sweet as Pop Rocks, plus a hint of garlic and a sheen of butter. The only flourish is a tangle of gently sautéed pea shoots, which add dimension and a bit of sophisticated heft. It’s all so zippy and Technicolor that I honestly hope out-of-town friends will force me back to the View soon and give me an excuse to have it again.

Curry Goat at Kabawa

You’ve got to settle in for the full tasting menu at Kabawa if you want to try this dish, and that’s not a burden but a blessing. No restaurant made me feel as straight-up happy this year as Kabawa, where the chef Paul Carmichael’s lively, creative, technically adroit exploration of Caribbean flavors yields all hits, no skips. I could pick nearly any part of a meal there as a favorite, but the goat is an indisputable hero. Tender shredded goat meat, luscious and gently gamy, is formed into a tidy rectangle, then seared to a crackly crispness. The fiery sauce Creole spooned over top is dark, thick, complex, and alive with spices and a bit of fishy funk from dried scallops. The dish is crowned with a pile of glossy fried curry leaves, whose woodsy, otherworldly aroma eddies around your face as the dish is placed before you, a promise of imminent pleasure.

Chicken Parm at JR & Son

Two brilliant things are happening on this plate, a star dish at what I think might be one of the year’s most underappreciated new restaurants. The first is the tomato sauce, which blankets an enormous fried-chicken cutlet, and tastes so bright and fresh that I wondered if it was actually raw—it’s not, but it’s punched up with enough vinegar and gently hot Calabrian chile pepper that it activates all the summertime receptors in your brain. The second is the abundant scattering of sesame seeds, which is not a standard garnish for a chicken parm in its platter form, but which brilliantly evokes the seed-studded rolls that serve as the best vehicles for chicken-parm sandwiches. An entrée that’s too often a boring fallback for the unadventurous diner is transformed, here, into a clever, dazzling reward.

Bánh Mì Pate at Bánh Anh Em

Nearly every dish at this marvellous East Village restaurant is a kaleidoscope of flavors and textures, riotous with green herbs and vibrant pickles, but these sandwiches are unadorned, almost drab. They arrive as a pair, the small loaves, still warm from the oven, split lengthwise and stuffed with just two ingredients: a smear of spiced, unctuously meaty pate and a cloud of spun pork floss, airy and savory-sweet. Served with a cup of fermented hot sauce, for cutting through all the richness, it’s the best sandwich I’ve had all year: meticulously engineered minimalism at its most extravagant.

Whole Fried Fish at Bong

The fish—dorade, on my visits—arrives intact, glassy-eyed and gorgeous, its skin scored into diamonds and crispy as the top of a crème brûlée. Forget the utensils: this is hand food. Pluck off a piece of fish, place it in one of the leaves of lettuce that come alongside, then tuck in a sprig of coriander and maybe a sliver diếp cá (fish mint). There are two sauces for dipping, one a fermented hot sauce and the other a salty-sour tamarind sauce with a dusky depth. Pick and mix, play around, lick your fingers, kiss your dining partner, find a combo of flavors and textures and spice that works for you, then flip the fish over and start it all over again on the other side.

Huevos Fritos con Patatas y Gambas at Bartolo

I’m still not entirely sure why Bartolo, a new Madrid-inspired restaurant in a charming West Village basement, categorizes this dish as an appetizer. It’s enormous, enough to serve as a full meal for two, featuring several potatoes’ worth of French fries (airy, crispy, melty) tossed with a boatload of massive shrimp, plus sizzly garlic oil and a few gold-yolked fried eggs. The hulking size, the heartiness, and the rustic simplicity all feel slightly off-kilter on this chic spot’s otherwise refined menu, but it works, the way a sock to the jaw works—simple, effective, forceful.

Filet O’Tofu at Mommy Pai’s

You’re almost certainly coming to this Nolita takeout window for the chicken, and both in tenders form and in sandwiches the chicken is absolutely great. But what will keep you coming back is the tofu. As the name of this sandwich suggests, it bears some structural similarities to a McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish, but only in the sense that we human beings share more than half our DNA with a banana. A soft bun cradles an impossibly crisp-outside-and-tender-inside slab of tofu, which is topped with mayo and a pleasing squish of melted American cheese. But the rocket-to-the-moon additions are fresh cilantro, sharp scallions and red onion, a pile of pickled cucumber, and a huge slather of Mommy Pai’s spicy, mega-garlicky nam prik noom sauce, which is neon-green with pounded chiles. Like all the best sandwiches, it’s a satisfying synthesis of nostalgia and audacious invention.

Pastasciutta at Zimmi’s

Chicken has never been one of the world’s optimal pasta meats, having been thoroughly eclipsed by more flavorful, more versatile options like beef and pork. Zimmi’s secret is to forget about the usual bits of the bird and focus on the parts that really pack a punch. In the Provençal-inflected pastiascutta, the chef Maxime Pradié dresses fresh, buttery-silky tagliatelle in a glorious ragout built out of chicken livers and a host of the bird’s other organ meats. It’s rich, resonant, and complex, with sparks of green herbs cutting through the rumblingly deep flavors. In my review of the restaurant, back in February, I described eating this dish as “like kissing God full on the mouth.” I don’t think I can put it any better than that.

The Cheesesteak at Danny & Coop’s

It’s the only thing on the menu. It’s brought to you by a movie star. And, yeah, it’s worth it. Get it with hot peppers, or with a mix of hot and sweet. Eat it as soon as you can, so that the cheese is still hot and oozy, and the beef is tender and yielding. Turn your head to the side, unhinge your jaw, and prepare for a glorious mouthful. Will you catch a glimpse of Bradley Cooper, who’s been known to occasionally work the line? Who cares. Don’t get distracted. Eat your sandwich. ♦

The second Presidency of Donald Trump has been unprecedented in myriad ways, perhaps above all in the way that he has managed to cajole, cow, or simply command people in his Administration to carry out even his most undemocratic wishes with remarkably little dissent. Some civil servants and senior officials, however, are experiencing bouts of conscience. In March, Erez Reuveni, a veteran Justice Department lawyer, was promoted to the position of acting deputy director of the Office of Immigration Litigation. He decided to personally take on the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who had been wrongly sent back to El Salvador, in violation of a 2019 court order. On April 5th, Reuveni told his supervisor he would not sign an appeal brief that said Abrego Garcia was a “terrorist.” According to a whistle-blower complaint that Reuveni later filed, he said, “I didn’t sign up to lie.” He was suspended and then fired.

Other career prosecutors have chosen to step down. In February, when Trump officials moved to dismiss corruption charges against New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams, it triggered resignations from Danielle R. Sassoon, the interim United States Attorney in Manhattan, and from Kevin O. Driscoll and John Keller, the two officials in charge of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section. In September, Erik Siebert, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, resigned, after his investigations into Letitia James and James Comey stalled and Trump demanded that he be fired.

There has been turnover in senior ranks of the military as well. In October, Admiral Alvin Holsey, the head of the U.S. Southern Command, abruptly announced that he would retire at the end of the year. Tensions had reportedly been mounting between Holsey and the Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, particularly over the admiral’s concerns about the legality of drone strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean. Now military experts have raised the possibility of war crimes, as lawmakers investigate a drone operation on September 2nd that destroyed a boat and killed everyone on board.

The excesses of the Administration seem only to be escalating. A ProPublica investigation, published in late October, found that ICE had arrested more than a hundred and seventy American citizens, nearly twenty of whom were children. In November, after the shooting of two National Guard soldiers in Washington, D.C., allegedly by an Afghan national, Trump suspended the issuance of visas for people travelling on an Afghan passport, halted the processing of all asylum claims, and vowed to “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries.”

Anyone still serving in the Trump Administration must reckon with the reality that, when the government has previously perpetrated egregious miscarriages of justice, history has not been forgiving to those who’ve gone along, however reluctantly. Consider the incarceration of Japanese Americans during the Second World War. On the morning of December 7, 1941, when Japan launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, in Hawaii, more than a hundred and twenty-five thousand people of Japanese ancestry lived in the continental United States, most of them on the West Coast. Nearly two-thirds were American citizens. Wild reports—later debunked—of lights signalling to Japanese vessels offshore proliferated. Public fears about a potential enemy attack from within began to spread, even as intelligence officials in Franklin Roosevelt’s Administration believed them to be baseless.

Lieutenant General John DeWitt was the head of the Army’s Western Defense Command. Driven by his own alarmism and his suspicions of members of the “Japanese race,” he began pushing for the removal of people of Japanese descent from the West Coast. The Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, a revered figure in Roosevelt’s Cabinet, initially had doubts about the legality of the plan, as did his deputy, John J. McCloy, though they ultimately supported it, as a matter of military necessity. But lawyers for the Justice Department, who bore responsibility for the handling of “alien enemies,” argued that a mass evacuation was unnecessary and likely unconstitutional.

The debate culminated in a tense meeting, on the evening of February 17, 1942, at the Georgetown home of the Attorney General, Francis Biddle, who had joined the Cabinet only a few months earlier. Edward J. Ennis, the head of the Justice Department’s “aliens” division, and James H. Rowe, the Assistant Attorney General, were forceful in their opposition to the plan. But Biddle, who had also been opposed, was noticeably reticent, Rowe later recalled. Then an Army official drew from his pocket a draft evacuation order, and Biddle revealed that he had dropped his objections to it. Ennis nearly wept.

Two days later, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order No. 9066, which led to the U.S. government dispatching the entire Japanese American population of California, Oregon, and Washington to ten concentration camps, as Roosevelt initially termed them, in the interior of the country. (The final camp did not close until early 1946.) Justice Department lawyers went on to defend the policy in court and, most controversially, took steps to obscure from the Supreme Court reports that cast doubt on the military justification and showed that Japanese Americans were overwhelmingly loyal to the United States.

In the decades since, numerous historians, as well as members of a federal commission that, in 1981, held hearings across the country, have studied the path to the executive order. The circle of blame has included not just Army and War Department officials but Biddle, who chose to “surrender,” as the historian Peter Irons put it, in his book “Justice at War.” Biddle admitted in his memoirs that, being “new to the Cabinet,” he was reluctant to challenge Stimson, “whose wisdom and integrity I greatly respected.” Irons also scrutinized Ennis’s decision to sign on to a misleading brief to the Supreme Court, observing that “institutional loyalty had prevailed over personal conscience.”

Standing firm on principle sometimes sits opposite other factors, such as fealty to colleagues and professional ambition, but it invariably comes from within. During the early days of the first Trump Administration, Sally Yates, who had been Obama’s Deputy Attorney General and had stayed on as the acting Attorney General, directed her staff not to defend an executive order from Trump restricting travel from several Muslim-majority countries—his so-called Muslim ban. Trump fired her. Several months later, Yates delivered a commencement-week speech to graduates of Harvard Law School, in which she talked about the need to hone the “compass that’s inside all of us.” Introspection about difficult decisions that involve conscience, she said, helps “develop a sense of who you are and what you stand for.” For those in the second Trump Administration, the time to answer those questions could be now. ♦